Major Update for Steam

This summer Valve will ship a major update to its online gaming platform Steam, introducing a set of community features.

Beginning in July, Steam users can set up their own personal Steam pages and profiles, create and join groups, schedule games with friends, review who they've played with, see how well everyone played, chat with groups, chat via voice, and more. These new community services and features can be used with all Steam games, which include new releases and classic titles from leading publishers and independent developers.

Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve, states:

Our community has given us great direction on the ways they want to see Steam evolve. Adding these new community features to make it easier to connect with other gamers is something we've wanted to see on Steam for a long time and this latest update is just the start. We've got a long list of items that we're working on to make it easier for gamers to connect and play games on Steam.

This upgrade marks the largest extension to the Steam platform since its first commercial release in March 2004.

Even though Valve claims the community wants these updates, one can wonder since when IRC, ventrilo and various community sites wasn't good enough.